What is your Performance DNA?

Each one of us has a “Virtual DNA” not just a physical DNA. The Virtual DNA determines your performance style. Knowing your Performance DNA is important to understanding self. Most of us are oblivious to our Performance Style or DNA. Sometimes we prefer not to know. Looking self in the mirror is not easy, especially when it reveals parts of yourself that go beyond your looks. So what is your performance DNA?

While there are many models out there, I like one that uses talent analytics and big data to help determine performance DNA and motivators. This model compares your “DNA” with that of others worldwide, and based on the comparison can make predictions about the way you: Solve Problems, Persuade Others, Deal with Change, and Deal with Rules and Norms. So there are Four key dimensions to your performance style:

How you solve problems (Commanding vs Collaborating)

How you persuade people (Outgoing vs Objective)

How you deal with change (Routine vs Rapid)

And How you deal with rules (Exacting vs Easy Going)

Your performance style was formed since you were a teenager, based on culture, parents, friends, school, and many other factors. Instead of trying to judge you like psychometric assessments do, it sheds light on your preferred way of working and dealing with people and the world around you. There is nothing good or bad in the result. It is all good, because it just shows you how you react. How you behave. This allows you to understand how you deal with the situations that face you; how and why you get angry, sad, happy, cooperative, or not so cooperative.

This simple analysis of performance style, combined with data analytics and artificial intelligence opens up doors for self discovery and understanding that go beyond regular assessments like DISC, MBTI, Big 5 and other psychometric assessments. It allows you to explore self without simplifying or over complicating things, and without passing judgment on good or bad on your modus operandi.

The Talent Analytics not only allows self understanding, but also allows analyzing group behavior and synergy, in addition to predicting performance, retention, succession planning and much more.

Some companies today have figured out certain performance styles that fair better than others in certain roles in the organization. So when they hire they try to predict performance based on talent analytics and so they ensure they understand what a person can bring to the role he or she is hired to do.

Big Data tools are available to show companies patterns among their top performers. These patterns might not be visible from human analysis.

Talent Analytics will become a new norm in the corporate world in the coming few years.

Talent Analytics is not a judgment on yourself or personality like many psychometric assessments out there. Instead it is about shedding some light on how you prefer to interact with the world around you. It is like showing you how yourself sees the outside world and decides to react to it. Understanding is key to boosting your performance. Organizations and individuals are understanding that more and more. Research is showing improved performance from just understanding performance style, even if no clear direct action was taken, beyond understanding. This is an amazing finding and gives hope to organizations that there are ways to improve or “hack” into performance fast.

So what is your performance style? how does it help you in your role? what challenges are facing you today? and how much of them are related to your performance style?

Luckily there are ways to find out. You can do an assessment online to help you determine. Be careful which assessment you choose. I did research on over 80 tools available on the internet. Of them, I found maybe ten convincing ones. The rest were too judgmental, old fashioned (focusing on the assessment element), or not too accurate. In the bright side, I found some that are over 86% and some even 96% accurate. Also, it is important that you have someone with talent analytics expertise who can help you read your report and answer specific questions you might have pertinent to your career and specific needs.

Same thing applies to companies. Many complain that they went through assessment exercises for their employees with very low improvements. Most of the time I found that when that happened, there was too much focus on the assessment individual results, without trying to analyze the results in context of the environment, or the strategic objectives that led to the analysis.

We now have a great opportunity to peak at our performance style DNA as individuals and companies, and nothing will be the same again in personal or corporate life. I recently sat with the Vice President of one of the leaders in data analytics worldwide. His words still ring in my ears: “We can alter people behavior. We can predict how they react. We are at awe of what we found, and we are still not able to fully grasp the repercussions of these breakthroughs.”

I am dedicating a lot of time and effort to helping individuals and organizations get value from talent analytics. So I am bias to the field. But you do not have to take my word for it. The world is bringing us an avalanche of case studies from political and corporate worlds on how companies are boosting performance using Talent and Data Analytics. The possibilities are amazingly promising in sales, marketing, software development, health care, politics, and much much much more.